The Limits of Stupidity

Need a reason to hope? History shows progress can be hard to derail.

The news is grim.

Pandemic, inflation, political instability. War in Ukraine. Russia threatening nuclear strikes like it’s 1983. A whiff of fascism in the air. And whatever the hell is happening in the UK.

Some of this was, as scientists say, “exogenous.” Nobody chose to unleash Covid. But much is the product of plain old human stupidity.

Think back to 2001. We wouldn’t be where we are now if the President of the United States hadn’t thought the best way to respond to a terrorist attack was not to lead the united, prosperous Western world in hunting down the terrorists — too simple — but instead invade and occupy an irrelevant country that had nothing to do with the attack.

And Brexit? Why, yes, all this peace and prosperity is intolerable! Let’s smash everything. Then — and only then — think seriously about what we’ll replace it with.

“President Donald Trump”? It was such an obviously ridiculous idea that it was literally a punchline in The Simpsons. Yet tens of millions of Americans thought it was an excellent idea. So good, in fact, they want to do it again.

And Vladimir Putin? The invasion of Ukraine was idiotic and yet his decision-making has actually gotten worse. Now he thinks he can salvage his war by sending hundreds of thousands of poorly trained, poorly equipped, morose middle-aged conscripts into a high-tech meat-grinder. It’s a plan so dumb it would make a good episode of South Park. (I believe it was Clausewitz who observed that if the plan you are contemplating brings to mind South Park, don’t do it.) And he threatens to use nuclear weapons if Russia loses the territory it has taken, a course of action whose consequences would start with Russia being as globally popular as Nazi Germany circa 1944 then scale up to regional devastation and, quite possibly, civilizational collapse. It’s really stupid, is what I’m saying.

(Yes, I generally avoid politics on PastPresentFuture. But, on Brexit, whatever its wisdom — and reasonable people can disagree — the lack of serious exploration of alternatives to European Union membership before choosing to end that membership is a textbook-worthy illustration of How Not To Make Decisions. As to Donald Trump, it was one thing, I suppose, to vote for him in 2016 to “shake up Washington.” But if you think he did a bang-up job and want him back in office? I can only respond with a possibly apocryphal story from the newspaper where I worked for many years: One day, a furious reader calls to complain about a story in the paper. The call gets passed up to the editor-in-chief. After trying several times to explain why the caller’s complaint is baseless, the editor asks the caller for his full name and street address. He writes it down and tells the caller, “I’m now going to walk down the hall to the circulation department and cancel your subscription. You’re too f***ing stupid to read my newspaper.”)

What’s truly depressing about this era isn’t that the news is so relentlessly grim. It’s that it’s relentlessly stupid. One bad turn of events after another is the product not of exogenous shocks like hurricanes. It’s not even the result of people making tough decisions amidst terrible uncertainty. It’s people making obviously bad decisions.

It’s starting to feel like our species is too stupid to survive.

And that thought is really depressing. I’ve been bummed out for weeks. (I’ve also been listening to a lot of Nick Cave. That probably doesn’t help.)

Maybe you share my depression?

Or maybe I’ve now made you as depressed as I am? (Sorry.)

If so, I have something to cheer you up. Seriously.

This article is all sunshine and buttercups from here on.

Cast your mind back to the first day of 1914. If you were alive then — and well-informed on public affairs — you were probably optimistic about humanity’s future.

For almost a century, starting in the United Kingdom (British stupidity is clearly not hereditary) sustained economic growth took hold at a pace and scale never before seen in human history. Science and technology made spectacular advances. The ancient gloom of candles was replaced with the brilliance of electric lights, information that had never moved faster than a horse flashed as quick as light through wires and the air, and modern manufacturing pushed down the prices of goods and raised the quality so rapidly that even the poorest were feeling better off. Trade crossed land and ocean like never before. People were even flying. In the sky. Like gods. It was a wonderful time to be alive.

Underlying all this, making it possible, was peace. The Great Powers of Europe had seemingly abandoned the eternal impulse to smash the china every now and then.

You know what happened in August, 1914. But it will be over by Christmas, they said.

They didn’t say which Christmas.

By the Christmas of 1918, the Great Powers of Europe, with a little American assistance, had rid themselves of peace, prosperity, and progress. But they weren’t done smashing things. They had just started.

(An aside: The late 1990s felt like pre-August 1914 Europe, for similar reasons, and that brief era ended thanks to decisions that were, if anything, even more foolish. What is it about progress, prosperity, and hope that we don’t like?)

Long story short, the men of eminence and education who headed the most advanced civilizations ever constructed by human hands made one terrible decision after another. A badly flawed peace treaty. A plethora of bad economic decisions. Surging nationalism. Totalitarian ideologies rising, liberal democracy waning. An American stock market juiced up by idiotic policies crashing, Great Depression, yada yada yada, an even worse war, the invention of a weapon capable of wiping out cities in a flash, and the coining of the word “genocide” because, well, you know.

Between 1914 and 1945, humanity seemed to have a death wish. Or we just got catastrophically dumber. Whatever the cause, we spent much of the first half of the 20th century doing seemingly all we could to destroy everything and everyone.

By now, you’re probably thinking, “I thought this was going to be sunshine and buttercups?”

Well, have a look at these buttercups.

These charts (thank you to the invaluable Our World In Data) all tell essentially the same wonderful story: Splendid long-term trends were not derailed by the folly and madness that dominated the first half of the 20th century.

In some cases, progress was interrupted. You can clearly see the First and Second World Wars in some of the life expectancy trend lines (with a little help from the Spanish Flu). And you can see the Great Depression in the hours-worked chart. But in each case, the overall trend resumes after the interruption.

To see this most clearly, take a look at the chart of Germany’s gross domestic product.

The First World War did terrible economic damage to Germany. And small wonder. Germany was strangled by the Royal Navy for four years. An entire generation of young men was sent into industrialized slaughter.

Then, when the GDP line was recovering, the Great Depression pushed it back down. Another seeming recovery ended when Germany’s skies filled with enemy bombers and the Red Army rumbled over the horizon. The scale of destruction is almost impossible to exaggerate. Randomly name almost any German city, pull up photos of what it looked like in 1945, and it is all but certain you will see endless heaps of rubble and ash.

But now take a look at that chart with a broader perspective. See the upward curve leading to the First World War? Visualize it extending smoothly upward and you eventually get to … the actual trend line of the past several decades. In other words, Germany and Germans suffered appalling economic losses for half a century but ultimately they got to where they seemingly would have arrived anyway.

I think what we’re seeing here is evidence of how bloody hard it is to derail systemic progress driven mostly by science and technology.

Of course nothing is inevitable. If the Cold War had degenerated into a full-scale exchange of thermonuclear devices in 1962 or 1983, we can be sure the lines above would have suffered more than a little temporary blip. They may even have stopped entirely.

It’s also important not to automatically extrapolate this into the future. The scientific and technological advances driving the trends above are different from the scientific and technological advances of our era. We cannot discover and deploy electricity again. And so we cannot assume that the tectonic forces of progress will always be strong enough to overcome whatever stupidity we throw at the world.

But at a minimum, this does show, I would suggest, that not even the monstrous stupidity of so many humans between 1914 and 1945 was enough to cripple, let alone halt, the progress humanity made thanks to the wondrous intelligence of other humans before, during, and after.

If you and I had lived in that era, and followed the news closely, we may have missed this fundamental reality entirely. And become much too depressed.

A similar dynamic is at least possible today.

And so I conclude with the sage words of my dear old dad: Don’t let the stupid bastards get you down.